7 interesting ways to utilize your website traffic data

You’ve created a website. You’ve put out some great content. And you’ve even gated some of it using a WordPress membership plugin. Now you’re actually ranking pretty well on Google and your organic traffic isn’t looking half-bad either. But what does any of that actually mean for your business? Analytics let you look at what that traffic is. Where is it coming from? What pages are those visitors looking at and for how long? What is your most popular content? Who are the people visiting your site anyway? Are you reaching your ideal customers? Are you actually writing for your targeted buyer personas? There are countless ways you can use your website traffic data to answer these questions. Here are a few of the key ones, and how they can affect your future actions.

Convey the right message

How do you tell if your message is effective or not? This can be answered, in some ways, by how long a visitor spends on any given page. If your content is a three-minute read, for instance, and people are only spending an average of one minute on that particular page, they are not reading your material completely. This means your message is not completely reaching the readers. There can be a number of reasons for this. Maybe your content is boring. Or you’re using jargon which the reader doesn’t understand. On the positive side, if that page is shared many times on social media and people are reading it all the way through, it is a good piece of content that is fully delivering your message. If it is a conversion page and you are actually getting conversions, your message is working.

Refine Your Method

There are many marketing methods – like inbound marketing, link building, and social media, which are “free”. And paid ads like pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and boosted posts. How do you know if these are working? Your website traffic data tells you where your users are coming from, whether they are referred through social media, found you through Google, and how they discovered your website and your content. What this means is that, if you are putting a lot of effort into one method of marketing or another. And it is not yielding the kind traffic you need, then it’s time to change it up. On the flip side, you can see where traffic is coming from and identify areas where more efforts might pay off in a bigger way.

Redefine Your Targets

When you first started your website, you probably had a target market in mind or a persona you figured out was your ideal customer or reader. Well, if the people visiting your site do not match that persona, then something is going on. This may mean that you were wrong about your target audience. As a result, if you change targets and aim for those who are visiting your site. And those who are interacting with you on social media, you may actually get more organic traffic, more conversions, and more sales. However, this may not always be the case. And there may be something else going on.

Revise Your Message

Maybe you have inadvertently stumbled on an audience of new targets and that’s great, but your original target audience will still be the ideal target. This means instead of adjusting your aim, you need to revise your message instead. This does not mean you will abandon the audience you have accidentally uncovered. But that you will go back to targeting your ideal customer. This might be difficult to manage, and it will take some work to determine the balance between your message and your audience. And to figure out how they interact. Don’t be afraid to experiment with some new content and try to target both audiences if you can.

Sell Advertising Space

Getting a lot of web traffic? Have a significant amount of viewership? There are brands who would like to get in front of those readers in a number of ways. One way to make some money with your website is by selling advertising space. You can do this in several ways.

Native Ads: The more traffic you have, the more likely people are to click on native ads like Google AdWords and Amazon ads. You can make some good money per click from these ads.

Visual Ads: Sell space for banners and other visual ads on your website for individual posts and in margins.

SEO Posts: As your site builds authority, SEO agencies and other brands will reach out to place posts on your site and will pay you for that space. You get good content and some money on the side.

A good use of your web traffic data is to prove to these advertisers that their message will reach a wide and diverse audience.

Calculate ROI

Are you reaching your targets? Was that paid ad campaign worth it? The answer lies in your website traffic data, and how many visitors came from a particular source. How many viewers took the action you asked for on the landing page? This is how you calculate your ROI. This allows you to put more effort into the activities that pay off the most. Drop the ones which are ineffective.

Conclusion

Your website traffic data can be very useful. But if you don’t make the best of it, it can simply be more numbers for you to look at. Use these seven methods to get started on making the data you are already gathering much more valuable. Was this article helpful and informative? Leave us a comment with your thoughts in the section below.

Baiju NT is the editor in chief and the driving force of Big Data Made Simple. He was one among many big data enthusiasts at Crayon Data, his parent company, to understand the pressing need for a big data resource website at a time when the idea of “big data” was gaining so much attention, and eventually launched Big Data Made Simple in 2013.